The Home in the Community
James Robertson
Model 1 refers to a society in which the dividing line between home and community is difficult to define. Such a society is warm and organic. The home is open to extended family and friends and neighbours. In it and around it take place all the important activities of our lives. It contains, in the able-bodied members of the household community, male and female alike, the providers of goods and services and care; and it contains -- in the young, the sick, the elderly, and in guests and travellers -- those who depend upon the able-bodied.
Model 2 suggest a society in which all the important activities of our lives have moved out of the home. This society is cold and clinical. Children are born in laboratories, brought up in public nurseries, and educated in schools and universities; old people go to old folks' homes for geriatric care; sick people and dying people go to hospitals; able-bodies people go to factories and offices to work; travellers are expected to go to hotels and boarding houses. Unrestricted sexual freedom in an institutionalized society would presumably even mean that people normally go out for sex, to specially organized meeting places, clubs and brothels.
In the last four or five hundred years human societies, especially in Europe, North America and other parts of the developed world, have been moving continually away from Model 1 towards Model 2. So much do we tend to take this for granted, that economists now assume that only the institutionalized activities of the kind of society shown in Model 2 should be given any value. Only activities of that kind should count as contributing towards such things as 'national products', 'national income', and 'national wealth'. For example, if we all stopped buying vegetables from shops and grew them ourselves instead, the economists would detect a fall in national product and national income, and worry even more than they do already about the unsatisfactory rate of economic growth. Among the facts of life for economists it that growth requires us to grow less food, and indeed to do less of everything for ourselves...
Excerpted from the book Power, Money and Sex by James Robertson - A MARION BOYERS BOOK. Copyright © James Robertson. Reprinted with permission. Other books by the same author include Profit or People? The New Social Role of Money, and The Sane Alternative.